New Directions in Qualitative Data Access

One of the places data archives experience emerging new and challenging data formats is within qualitative research. New social technologies such as e.g. Facebook, debates on the internet and photographing on mobile phones produce data for qualitative research project. The Danish Data Archive (DDA) has a long standing ambition to archive qualitative data alongside with quantitative data. To welcome qualitative data we need knowledge about variations in data formats which we must be able to support and archive. The article will be based on a study of data formats and the use of CAQDAS – Computer assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software – in Danish, empirically based social science PhD thesis published in 2009. The study will be related to comparable studies carried out in national and international contexts as well as initiatives concerning archiving of qualitative data among our fellow data archives.

Aileen O'Carroll, IQDA, Tara Murphy, TWCDI

This paper will describe the ongoing work of an innovative partnership between the Irish Qualitative Data Archive and the Tallaght West Childhood Development Initiative (based in west Dublin). RACcER (Re-Use and Archiving of Complex Community-Based Evaluation Research) aims to explore and implement new approaches to meeting the ethical and practical challenges involved in archiving, and creating appropriate levels of access to the complex qualitative and contextual data generated in the rigorous evaluation of a major community-based childhood intervention strategy. The project objectives include: documenting the concerns and expectations of research funding agencies, researchers and potential users; evaluating and enhancing IQDA protocols and procedures, especially in relation to evaluation research, through a participatory process of preparing qualitative data from CDI for archiving; dissemination of the outcomes of the project through the CDI and IQDA websites. It is intended that the partnership will act as a major demonstrator project for the promotion of qualitative data archiving and re-use across the Irish social science communities. The project has been co-funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and Tallaght West CDI.

The Historical Archives of the State Security Services (www.abtl.hu) has the task of preserving the pre-1989 documentary state-security archives, surveying their content, and making them available to citizens and researchers under strict conditions. The presentation provides on the one hand a broad outline of the Orwellian information system of the Archives, which guards all change and access to it, and the methods used to support this large mass of document accessing (special meta-data structure, mass use of OCR, examination of the introduction of text-exploring tools). On the other hand it seeks to show how, alongside strong access restrictions, it can make ever more of documents and service provisions compiled from the database (e. g. Archontology— https://www.abtl.hu/archontologia —and the photographic database https://www.abtl.hu/spyOne/anonymous) fully publicly accessible on the Internet or accessible by special privilege (e. g. to researchers). The database of the Historical Archives is also interesting from an IT point of view because the mass digitalization and the beginning of OCR use will bring an increase in volume of 2–3 TB a year.